Your feet are surrounded by black and white marble tiles. Dark wood, brass railings, and etched and beveled glass panels swaddle your comfort zone. Servers in starched linen shuttle through the room dispensing wine and menu advice. Diners--all hair, rosy cheeks and fingers loaded with insurance riders--seem to know each other (squeal squeal, kiss kiss, the insincerity that lubricates society). The menu has crab cakes and veal Oscar.
Café Pacific clawed its way onto the landlocked steak and potatoes terrain back in 1980, when Jack Knox and the late Mel Hollen partnered to create a "San Francisco-style" restaurant. Perhaps this is San Francisco in the minds of those who refer to the city as Frisco, even though they have one of their own up the freeway.
Not that any of this is a bad thing. Café Pacific is one of the few true neighborhood restaurants in this urban span: pretty good for an eatery lodged in a mall. And while the servers parade in whites, they're not stiff, at least not all of them. Our waiter noticed the anxiety. "Do you have time constraints?" "Seven-thirty," we said. "Mavs game?" he shot back.
It's always heartening to know a guy in pressed linen can relate to millionaires in floppy shorts chasing a ball through an airplane hangar. He had approximate prep times down on each dish, and he was able to estimate how frenetically we'd have to slalom and park simply by calculating cook and eat times (substitute appetizers and dessert with wine for fluid speed; plus the wine list has slender markups). Simple grills (fish, chops) are quick. Oven-roasted lamb chops take a bit longer. Lamb it is.
The portion is massive. Three pairs of chops are spaced inelegantly on the plate. They're wetted by a wine demi-glace. A mound of mashed potatoes rests nearby, along with a drift of carrot threads and green beans. The meat is fatty and chewy, but the flavor is invigorating: well-seasoned with that delicate thread of sweetness that rides the edge, threatening at every bite to jump into rude gamy raciness. It's this threat, that of the annihilation of polite culinary balance, that makes dining a voyeuristic thrill ride for those who break out into cold sweats when the wine is corked--more civilized than, say, watching an auto race with well-concealed hopes a car's rear end will break loose in turn four to set up a messy T-bone. That's true sports.
Our server may have been astute, but he was infuriatingly shy on prescience. Sure, it was fun to see Dirk gallop across the court while Cuban sprang to his feet every time his Mavs squandered eight-point leads only to squeak to a two-point win. Why couldn't he have told us to relax, dine leisurely and saunter home to turn on the tube? Then we could have watched what every casual basketball fan secretly hopes for: fits of fisticuffs between millionaire dribblers and their beer-fortified fans--in Detroit no less. Nothing better.
What the waiter does push is Café Pacific's seafood, which is a good thing, because this Highland Park checkered-floored cafe is essentially a fish shop. Yet on that score, the results are mixed, though the efforts can be fascinating. Tempura shrimp aren't just coated in a simple tempura batter; they are instead wrapped in sheets of glass rice noodles before they're dipped, a process that tightly retains tempura philosophy. Brought to Japan by Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century, tempura has in many ways evolved into the essence of Japanese cuisine: the meticulous deployment of the absolute freshest ingredients.
Consequently, tempura, when skillfully prepared, is a fried food that is light, with a taste completely defined by the ingredient itself rather than oil or batter. Here, the sheath is whisper-thin despite the double-layered exterior, slipping over the girth like a glass slipper. The shrimp drool rich briny sweetness.
Fried calamari is more competently typical--and typically uninteresting. The rings (only rings, not tentacles) are tender, and the coarse coating is deep bronze with a nutty flavor barely intruded upon by seasoning. It comes with two dipping sauces: cocktail and tartar. How trite is that?
Though more distracting than tragic, disappointments can mount. Item one: fish tacos. This is a thing you'd hope would be flawless in a Highland Park cafe, even one next to a Hermes boutique. And it looks that way at first, rife with potential. The tacos come with a sprawl of green rice, stained by cilantro, except this rice doesn't have the herb's uplifting aromas and energizing flavors. It mostly leaches butter, so it falls short of expectations.
So do the tacos. Sure, they're fat, loaded with tomatoes, peachy swirls of chipotle aioli and shredded lettuce without a hint of leaf blemish or iceberg rot. But the beer-battered white fish fillets were burned and dry. Leading edges and tapered tips were blackened and bitter.
Seafood linguini flaws are more subtle. The bowl rippled with shellfish musculature: scallops the size of 3/4-scale Big Mac replicas; puffed-up shrimp in exaggerated butterfly poses; strips of crab claw with red streaks as garish as '50s lipstick. The scallops are the only elements that exceeded expectations. When you get great cushions of shellfish like this, every bite is a risk. The meat could be dry and listlessly flavored, or the victim of a ripeness that sucker punches the palate with a fistful of off flavors.
These were firm and supple, graciously unfolding their delicate sweetness as the flakes moved through the mouth. Shrimp were not as impressive. Though muscular in stature, they didn't sweat the richness the tempura versions did. Crab stumbled further: The flesh was sinewy, and the parts unthreaded with stringy pith collapsed into loose mush. All was bathed in a heady tarragon cream sauce, the herb pulling to the forefront in every fork.
Still, these sorts of blemishes don't fatally sink a dining experience. Buck up and scan the room once more. The bar is like a long narrow cage, as it should be. Above is a rack suspended from a brass bar, loaded liquor bottles holding fluid that is both clear and in various shades of amber. In the center of the bar is an enormous clamshell filled with crushed ice, upended martini glasses rising from the top like the spires of a crown. Weird.
Though open, the kitchen is shielded from the dining room with glass. Copper pots and rippled stainless steel cladding glimmer through the panes. You have to peer hard and squint, though, to see the mechanics of the kitchen machine, as the gorier routines are shielded by semi-sheer cafe curtains.
Waiters drop off sweet potatoes, fried into stiffened coiled strings, in a cloth napkin bowl that looks like a project from an origami class. They're curled, crisp and meticulously free of oil.
Eat those with the ceviche, essentially a split-level lime puddle. One floods a saucer; the other fills a clamshell where most of the citrus-cooked seafood rests--nuggets of shrimp, scallop and lobster. The meat is firm and delicious. Over the surface of the saucer, near the base of the clamshell, is a slaw of carrot and jícama slivers laced with cilantro. A single shaving of green bell pepper rises out of nowhere, while the summit of the clamshelled seafood mound is crowned with a twisted lime slice: an elegant way to display this swath of oceanic cleanliness. A little trite, though, when you think about it.
Yet just as clichés constitute the bulk fiber of prose, they comprise the durable staples of restaurateuring, even in a saltwater fishing hole in the middle of a prairie. 24 Highland Park Village, 214-526-1170. Open for dinner 5:30-10 p.m. Monday-Wednesday, 5:30-10:30 p.m. Thursday, 5:30-11 p.m. Friday & Saturday. Open for lunch 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Monday-Friday. $$$
